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Sleeve Catching Fire at Dawn

Sleeve Catching Fire at Dawn

by Madeleine Wurzburger

Winner of the 2017/18 Book & Pamphlet Competition

Historical in one sense, exploring events such as the Black Death, the Reformation and cows watching the first passenger train pass by (1830), but also highlighting ideas that are very relevant today; injustice, intolerance and cruelty. Light plays significantly throughout – dawns, sunsets, darkness and enlightenment.

An extraordinarily precise and effective deployment of sometimes quite arcane knowledge. There’s the shock of originality, followed by the more important realisation that things that matter are being said. – David Constantine

These fiercely imagistic poems are as precise and unexpected as illuminations in a medieval manuscript. Light enters, with the reader, at strange angles into scenes or trains of thought that are unsettling and slyly funny. – Fiona Moore

Madeleine Wurzburger’s poems are remarkable acts of witness, emotion and ritual. Daring and authentic in their portraiture of historical and commonplace figures, each encounter is a linguistic snapshot, delicately rendered with a crispness of diction and a shifting syntax and complexity of tone. This is a rare glimpse of a bold and technical poet unafraid to dig deep. – Saradha Soobrayen

You sense Wurzburger’s need to honour the forgotten voices of the past throughout this impressive collection. She convinces by encouraging the reader to, as it were, eavesdrop on the social mores and idiosyncrasies of a world which is lost to us... Madeleine Wurzburger’s vision is uncommonly human, and uncommonly fragile... where the enchained continue to sing, in spite of everything. – The Yorkshire Times (read full review here).